Well, those farmers in rural states tend to hold many electoral votes as well as many senate seats. Don’t forget: no matter how many people live in the cities, the rural population has a far bigger say per person in how our leaders are elected and what the senate make up will be.

I am a long time reader of Paul Krugman, who also plays World of Warcraft. I often discuss politics with my online friends, and yes, I am an adult – my age is more than 40. I find the statistic entirely credible.

True, but we (as in American WoW players) are not a key voting bloc in presidential elections, we do not have money to persuade our leaders to pass legislation in our favor (WoW Subsidies for All!) and we do not have a national lobbying organization (we can’t even solve collection action problems online).

The importance of the rural is not the numbers, but the tens of millions for whom they are the “cultural norm.” Think of all those folks who live out in the suburbs and exurbs (along the coasts as well as anywhere else), drive absurdly inappropriate trucks (pickups and SUVs) and all-terrain vehicles and commute ridiculous distances to work, all in the name of frontier “self-sufficiency,” a mind-boggling fantasy; it is nonetheless a fantasy that, short having their noses rubbed in reality, they tend to take into the voting booths. It is no accident that Westerns as a popular form of escapist fantasy came just as any relation to the real settlement of the West disappeared. Of course the fantasy of self-reliance also dovetails nicely with the Right’s efforts to demolish the public sphere.